Calling Up the Fire

by Lori Martin

  “One, two!” the voices shouted. Nichos braced himself as the soldiers flung themselves against the door. The frame rattled warningly under the impact. The bolt would not hold long.

  “I’m sorry, dearest,” he said.

  “Nichos!”

  Against all the years of their unsettled marriage, he saw that this time she had come for him. She had left Baili. She had left Calli. She had left the child she considered her grandson. She had gone seeking within these walls: though somewhere outside, as they both knew, she might even have found Paither.

  But she had come seeking him.

  “Come out, lin!”

  They heaved again. Nichos’s foot was jammed into the corner. His other leg began to slide out from under him. “Pillyn.”

  He tried to give her a smile and couldn’t, but she saw the message in his eyes. She went to him. He took the dagger and sword from her, flung all the weapons aside, and gathered her into his arms.

  There was a final heave and shudder. The bolt gave way. The jamb split. As the door was propelled inward, bursting, showering wood splints and sending the bolt lock flying, she said, “I love you, Nichos.” He had just life and time enough left to hear, and take it to his heart.

  The battle raged over the Assemblage, the city, and the surrounding countryside until long past high-sun. Dusk would be coming on soon. Paither’s Squad fought through the Oldmarket and unexpectedly met up with survivors from Mejalna’s forces, who had escaped through the fallen Main Gate. The Mendales of the city had been overwhelmed, and though sporadic fighting could still be heard, the former capital of the heretics was now under Lindahne control. Paither left Samalas to reduce the outskirts, and led reinforcements to the besieged House.

  The dead and the dying littered the welcome-yard. Feimennas seemed to be jabbering everywhere. Confused officers were issuing confusing orders. They all agreed that Mejalna had been wounded; someone said it wasn’t mortal; but no one knew where she had been taken.

  She had in fact been carried off. The arrow had been removed and the antidote applied in case of poison. She had fainted, come back to consciousness, had issued orders by messenger-runners, and fainted again. As evening crept up Baili appeared from some recess of the House with the child at his heels and her screaming, hungry son in his arms.

  She sat up to nurse him, and was told that the relas had arrived. “Where is he?” she demanded, but they weren’t sure. Finally someone reported him to be searching near the Chamber hall, looking, they said, for her. Against all protests and the healer’s warnings she climbed out of bed.

  She was aware of the pain but it seemed removed, as if someone else were merely describing it to her. She couldn’t raise her arm on her wounded side; she had to cradle the baby against her left shoulder with one hand. Baili, who insisted on accompanying her, glanced suspiciously along each passage. There were still a few Mendales alive and loose in the building, they said.

  They passed corridors hastily turned into sick-rooms, where the wounded were being cared for, and quiet apartments which had remained oblivious to upheaval. The carnage before the main doors made Baili halt in his steps, appalled. Soldiers nearby broke into excited and angry descriptions of the fight. Mejalna went on, nearly running in impatience.

  The huge House seemed to have tripled in size, had become a nightmare building with no ending. She searched down one futile corridor after another. Finally she found him.

  Master Nichos and Mistress Pillyn were sprawled together, fair skin against dark, amid the shining cracked goblets and scattered, bloodstained linens. Paither was kneeling by Nichos’s head. He was motionless. There was no telling how long he had been there, mounted in the eternal grieving vigilance of a gravestone.

  She couldn’t even say his name. Her lips mouthed it. After a time he became aware of the baby’s soft sounds, and raised his head.

  His eyes shimmered with unshed tears. He saw his beloved and his newborn child through a sparkling haze, a silent curtain of water. They had been long separated, but he spoke as if she had always been with him.

  “I’ve failed him truly, now,” he said.

  Weeping herself, Mejalna held out the hand she couldn’t use, and never knew it. “Come away,” she said. “Come with me. Paither. Come with us.”

  Chapter 30

  At first the Lindahnes were stunned by success. Their slowness to understand victory made things a little easier for Ennilyn. For a time people smiled submissively and did as she told

  them. As the weeks passed and good reports of the war came from Mendale, they began to revel in their freedom. When news came of the official Mendale surrender they rejoiced, casting off the brown of mourning that had been worn in public all these years. The streets suddenly burst with bright color. There was a spate of weddings (and, as became clear the following year, conceptions). Daily duties were neglected, and the ale-houses were packed day and night. Only the farmers were willing to attend to their work, which would not wait; the first harvestings went on as usual.

  Factions sprang up too soon. The older generation remembered all too well the political art of jostling for position and favor. Ennilyn, readying to appoint new Hill councils and dismantle the remains of the Oversettle government, was besieged by office-seekers. She needed troops, too, to guard the many Mendale captives or to escort them back to MenDas, where Paither could deal with them, and she needed workers to bury the dead and builders to repair the ravages of battle. The Feimennas, still in tents on Lindahne land and not always with the consent of the locals, were awaiting their own orders to be sent from their first-high across the Valtah; in the meantime they did not seem to consider themselves under her command. The Advisors collected so long before by Samalas were of use to her, though many were dazed by the turn of events and unwilling to admit that the relas’s recklessness (as they had termed his drive to MenDas) had after all been successful. And despite her best efforts, the out-ofhand executions of accused cooperators went on. Mejalna’s traitor brother Daiv, whom Samalas had had arrested before his departure, committed suicide in his cell before a truth-seeking could be held.

  Occasionally her authority was questioned to her face. She stared all doubters down, though the experience secretly left her shaken. Her uncle Temhas, who had once been a member of the old Lindahne court, was now a valuable assistant and ally. When yet another challenger offered her disrespect, Temhas, without her knowledge, took him aside and thrashed him.

  She was working harder days than she had ever known before. Every morning there was something new to be handled, yet every night she was sleepless. Sleepless and despairing, even in the midst of their celebrations.

  Hajia was the only one who could guess at the cause. On every Hill but the First, temple services were being inaugurated with joy and thanksgiving. (There had been no shortage of volunteers to rebuild the temple of Simsas.) After each re-dedication, former priests and priestesses took up their charges again, welcoming eager novices to the ancient teachings of the cults. Proper worship was revived.

  Except on the First. There were no former priestesses here; all that remained of them was the memory of their last hard stand during the War. So the young uncertain Nialians, leaderless, swept the temple, cleansed the side altars, lit the hanging lamps, burned incense, and said what prayers they could. None of them knew what to do next.

  “Someone got into the temple last night,” Hajia had to tell her. “Some of the hangings were torn up.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Mendales, I think, or a spiteful cooperator. We don’t have everyone under control yet, I think there are still some escaped prisoners about. It’s my fault, I didn’t think we still needed guards. There were supposed to be some night attendants, of course, but one of the girls was ill, and the other two are blaming each other, they each claim it was the other’s watch. I’m sorry, Mother, I should have had things better in hand.”

  “Well, done is done, but let’s not have a repeat of this.” She went on wit
h her writing.

  Hajia cleared her throat and looked anxiously at Nhy, who was standing alongside, as if he could help. She had become friendly with the Feimenna; he had good sense and a proper respect for the gods. His constant attendance on the mother priestess made some of the Lindahnes uneasy; to Hajia’s eyes, it seemed to make Ennilyn uneasy herself, though she was learning his language and was occasionally heard giving voice to strange sounds. Nhy looked back now, red eyes empty of help but sympathetic. Hajia cleared her throat again, miserable.

  “Well?” Ennilyn demanded, looking up. She felt harried. “Is there something else?”

  “Oh Mother, I am sorry. I don’t know what to say. The sanctuary altar was damaged. I don’t even know how they did it, it’s so huge and heavy. I don’t know what tools they could have used on it.”

  She put down her pen. “How much damage?”

  “There’s a great deep gash across the front panel, one side to the other. It’s strange. The white marble around it is discolored as if... I don’t want to be fanciful, but it looks as if the marble veins had bled.”

  The Feimenna shifted. Ennilyn withdrew into herself. After a time she said, “Thank you. You may go,” and turned back to her writing.

  Hajia retired to her quarters. It was late, but she knew the mother priestess would go on working. She looks worn out, she thought. All this work she’s doing. And none of it is the right work. This is all the relas’s business, not her own. Not our own. The other girls are skittish with her, everyone’s skittish with her, and no wonder. Her eyes are all sunken in. Even her firedust hair seems dulled. If only the goddess –

  Down the hall a door opened and closed. Footsteps receded. That would be the Feimenna; the mother priestess had probably urged him to go to bed.

  Time for me, too. She lit her night candles and murmured a prayer. She fell asleep fully clothed, sprawled across the counterpane.

  Ennilyn also fell asleep, head on her arms on the table. Her candlelamp, which she had let burn too low, guttered out. She started awake into darkness. A crushing sadness yearned in her chest, left behind by a dream she could not remember. A faint call, a voice, sounded in her ears. She drew breath and shouted, “I will not be weak!” A crack of torchlight fell across the desk as the guard put his head in. “Mistress? Is everything all right?”

  She swept past him. Furious at someone or something, she pounded up the east palace stairs to Paither’s apartments, dismissed the guard there, and began to rummage through her brother’s possessions, flinging clothes and papers indiscriminately. When she found what she wanted and knew would be here – a treasure he would not have risked taking into battle – she grabbed up one of his cloaks, too long and bulky, and let herself out a side door.

  The sleepy stable boys looked at her face and didn’t dare to question her. She took the best flighter and went straight up the path to the First. At the temple she met more resistance. Hajia had tried to atone for their lapse; two young priestesses were now in attendance, and three sentries were on duty. None of them were willing to abandon their posts when she told them to go. She shouted and stamped her foot, reducing the priestesses to tears, and then threatened to put the soldiers on report. The voice was dinning in her ears now, the cry still unclear but insistent. Finally they left her to the solitude she demanded.

  She stood in the archway, possessed not by the divine but by rage, a rage so fierce it choked thought or utterance. It was an anger beyond her royal blood or prideful soul. With such anger the gods shake the Hills, yet she had no immortal power to wield. To her inflamed mind the voice now sounded mocking.

  In the inner sanctum she could just perceive the damage Hajia had spoken of. The altar, polished and gleaming, was crafted of light grace, belying its actual immense weight. The spiteful new gash cut across it with an angry grin.

  She stepped forward, casting off her cloak. In her hand a green jewel suddenly shone: the Strength and Knowledge of Armas, brought into the innermost presence of Nialia. A forbidden meeting. A breaking of the Mother’s covenant. Such had been the sin of her parents. It had given her life.

  She flung out her arms and cried aloud. The voice answered, and echoed, multiplying into ten, a hundred, a thousand, an unending Sea of voices: the voices of all the high priestesses who had gone before, in all the endless time of creation. Within and beside her, they sang and called.

  It was dark. Two standing torchlights smoked in the corners, which suddenly seemed closer. The air was heavy. Weight pressed upon her shoulders, as if clutching hands held her down. The walls were closer, looming. The walls were coming in. There was no air. No space. No escape. There had never been an escape.

  The girl called Scayna struggled for breath, twisting in the fading air, suffocating. A madwoman clutched at the piercing green jewel; its light sparkled between her fingers. She with no name raised fierce hands and brought the sacred stone down, down, and down, smashing it into the altar’s open wound.

  Grinding, tearing, with the voices screaming, the altar writhed like a dying animal and split asunder. The jewel in her hands shattered into crystal splinters. She saw green shimmering mist, a haze of torchlight, walls of white smothering gauze billowing inward, and a black aching nothingness that yawned before her. A huge wind rushed into it. It blustered at her back, shoving her to the pit’s edge.

  She fell to her knees. Her bleeding hands scrabbled for something to hold on to. The girl, the madwoman, the unnamed one, all sank teeth and nails into her flesh, fighting to keep hold of her. The unnatural wind whipped them towards the demanding darkness. They were thrashing animals; their desperate claws tore her through to the bone.

  She cried out, shrill, high, disbelieving: the same scream her newborn self had first loosed in the world.

  The girl, the madwoman, the unnamed one were hurled into the chasm. And blackness swallowed them.

  Before first light Hajia and the Feimenna stood over her and called. “Ennilyn,” the priestess said. “Mother? Are you hurt? Mother?”

  Nhy put an arm beneath her shoulders and raised her up. Her face was flushed with healthy color. Her eyes were radiant. She smiled from one to the other.

  Nhy helped her to her feet, but she was no sooner on them than she began to crumble. She fell back into a faint.

  “She’d better be put to bed.” Hajia said.

  The Feimenna lifted her easily. Her head leaned slackly against his chest.

  The sanctuary altar was split into two great halves, which had been shoved apart the length of a man. The two halves of the facing stone, where the ugly gash had been, were now smooth and flawless, healed, perfect. Tiny pieces of green jewel-like crystal were scattered about the floor mosaics, glittering.

  “How did she have the strength?” Nhy asked. He looked down at the small unconscious woman in his arms.

  Hajia had no answer. Prickles ran down her forearms. She stepped gingerly into the gap between the two sides of the split altar and knelt. Her hands dug at something. She broke off with an exclamation.

  The Feimenna came closer. “What is it?”

  In the earth that had been beneath the altar she had uncovered a great gold and alabaster case, the size of a longbox. She was not long in discovering its contents, but she was slow to speak. The silence dragged on. Ennilyn breathed peacefully, growing heavier in Nhy’s arms. Finally he said, “Please, holy priestess. Can you not to tell me what it is?”

  The Nialian raised her head. “It’s the sacred writings. All our rites, our rituals, our traditions. The proper worship of the goddess... everything’s here.” Her fingers flickered among the scrolls. “It was said they were lost. But someone put them beneath the altar, hid them here, left them for the generations to follow. Maybe a thousand years ago, maybe a thousand lifetimes ago. As if someone knew even then that we might be left alone and unguided. And Ennilyn – she’s found them.”

  Outside, the dawning sun lifted its fiery head and glowed upon the temple, the gods’ firebrand raised over the ea
rth. All across the eastern slopes light rose up and bathed the Five Hills of Lindahne in soft brilliance. Soon, as it mounted, the incandescent eye would creep over hidden shadows and darkling earths, and conquer them; but that would be later. When the priestess and the stranger brought Ennilyn down the path to the home of her royal ancestors, it was yet early. Daybreak was just beginning.

  In the second moon of autumn, Paither-relas returned to Lindahne. The Festival marking a new Royal Hold had always been held at the winter’s solstice; he would have his official crowning then. In the meantime they celebrated the baby’s name-receiving, which was long overdue, and called him Briahne, after the boy-god of childhood pleasures. The country people were charmed to gain a queen of such beauty, while the nobleborn were glad that Mejalna, too, had a leader’s abilities. As the blood heir, Paither would of course have the first Hold, but in three years’ time Mejalna would become supreme ruler, until the next Hold came around again and put Paither back in Chair. So it would go on. It was a cherished luxury to them all, to be able to foresee a free and secure future. Forever past, forever to come, read the inscription on Paither’s ring.

  But there were many matters still to settle. After the fight for MenDas (known later as the Battle of the Capital), the Mendale army had collapsed. Commander Dirrl had been killed in the final action; Haol himself had offered Paither their surrender. The hatred between the two men had crackled openly between them, with the one seeing an arrogant upstart and the other the cause of his parents’ deaths. Haol was too dangerous to leave in his own land. He and the other Tribunes were taken in chains to Lindahne, where they joined former Governor Nesmin in a holding-house. Paither, who didn’t trust himself in this, left the details to Samalas.